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Need Help From a Bloglines User

I have long envied the spiffy blogrolls some edubloggers have in their sidebar. I’ve found many good blogs from them. I want to add one to my sidebar.

I have a Bloglines account so I used the wizard in their Share feature. It generates a snippet of code that I added to my sidebar. It sounds simple, but every time I try I get the following error message in my sidebar:

The user name you are using to access this blogroll is incorrect. Be sure you use your Bloglines user name and not your email address. Click here to create or edit your user name.

The link takes you right into my accounts page in Bloglines. I get this message regardless of whether I use my login email address or what seems like the logical user name derived from it. I’ve search through all the options and account info, but nothing else seems to be a user name.

Next I tried to follow the Bloglines method of viewing a person’s public blogroll

http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME

However, regardless of what I type as user name, I get the following message,

You have entered an incorrect user name.

Then I wondered if maybe none of my blogroll is public. I search all through their help files and the settings again, but couldn’t find a way to make things public. Next, I tried creating a folder titled public and dragging things into it, but that doesn’t seem to solve the problem either. I even tried renaming the folder to /public but Bloglines wouldn’t accept that.

Anyone know how to fix this problem? Please let me know. I’ve spent far too much time on it.

January 6th, 2007 | Category: Uncategorized

4 comments to Need Help From a Bloglines User

  • Tarmo Toikkanen
    January 8, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    Hi Susan,

    I also wrestled a bit with this problem. The solution is to go to Options, then “Blog settings”, and choose a user name there. It’s a bit confusing since that’s for the blog functionality, and I didn’t want to use Bloglines’s blog. But that’s what’s needed. You don’t need to fill in any other fields or publish the blog as such.

    Bloglines will verify that you’ve given a unique username, and after that you can use the http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME URL, replacing USERNAME with the username you’ve chosen.

  • Susan
    January 8, 2007 at 1:12 pm

    THANK YOU Tarmo! I don’t know that the solution would ever have occurred to me. Thank you for sharing it.

  • Emma
    January 15, 2007 at 5:33 pm

    I’ve also used Grazr to generate a list of my bloglines subscriptions on my blog – when you list the URL that you want to generate the Grazr from you need to have http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=Emma (only put whatever your account is in there, rather than “Emma”) at the end.
    It also updates automatically – you’ll see that I now have your blog there under elearning.
    Any folders you’ve designated as private don’t show up.

  • Susan
    January 16, 2007 at 1:50 pm

    Emma,

    Thanks for the suggestion. I had not heard of Grazr but I like how it looks on your sidebar. Thanks for adding me to your blogroll; I’m honored!